# InstantRetouch: Efficient and High-Fidelity Instruction-Guided Image Retouching with Bilateral Space

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05071/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [ProlificDreamer: High-Fidelity and Diverse Text-to-3D Generation with Variational Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16213/) (2023)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14683/) (2025)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10012/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10089/) (2023)
- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [FlowEdit: Inversion-Free Text-Based Editing Using Pre-Trained Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08629/) (2024)
- [In-Context Edit: Enabling Instructional Image Editing with In-Context Generation in Large Scale Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20690/) (2025)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (2017)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [Guiding Instruction-based Image Editing via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17102/) (2023)
- [SmartEdit: Exploring Complex Instruction-based Image Editing with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06739/) (2023)
- [InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03895/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language-guided photo retouching aims to adjust color and tone while preserving geometry and texture. Recently, diffusion-based retouching shows a superior visual quality, but often struggles with both fidelity issues due to its generative nature and efficiency because of its iterative sampling process. In this work, we propose an efficient and fidelity-preserving retouching method using bilateral space manipulation, which is both compact and content-decoupled. Specifically, instead of directly editing pixels or image latents, our model predicts a low-resolution bilateral grid of affine transforms, which are sliced using a learned guidance map and then applied to the full-resolution image. This approach yields both high fidelity and improved efficiency. To retain strong priors of a pretrained generative model, we distill a multi-step diffusion model into our bilateral grid framework using Variational Score Distillation, complemented by a prompt alignment loss to guide instruction-following behavior. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark and evaluate our method across multiple dimensions: fidelity, instruction following, and efficiency. Compared to the latest retouch methods, like Gemini-2.5-Flash (Nano-Banana), our method can avoid content drift, significantly improve latency, and generate visually pleasing edits, while maintaining a high level of fidelity. Project page: https://openimaginglab.github.io/InstantRetouch/.